After months of preparation and hard work, the HWBOT team is incredibly happy to finally introduce OC-ESPORTS.io, a completely new platform for competitive overclocking. Better known under its working title of Revision6 (or #revision6 for the social media adepts), this new platform focuses completely on the competitive side of overclocking. With our in-house competition structure known as Road To Pro, we create a divisional structure where any type of overclocker can find a place to compete and excel. The platform allows for partners to set up their own competition series too and combining the Road To Pro, the online and live competitions we build a Global Seasonal Leaderboard for competitive overclocking. Without further ado, let’s have a look at some of the main features!

To Put Things In Perspective, A Historical Overview of Competitive Overclocking

First things first. Let’s explain how this new platform came about by putting it in its historical context. On the right hand side you can find an image explaining the evolution of overclocking.

Everything begins with an individual overclocking purely for its own benefit and entertainment. As most of the overclockers today, the goal is only to increase the performance of its own system for example to get better gaming performance. As the individual may run in to some problems or want to share their experience, he will join a discussion board or forum and start participating in the community. He can open a thread showing his own overclock or ask others how to improve further. As the community of overclockers grows, forum administrators see the need of hosting benchmark specific forum threads where everyone can share their benchmark result. Usually you can find a leaderboard ranking in the opening post which is updated manually.

The next step are the external leaderboards. Organizations which span across forums and communities keep track of the best overclocking results around the web. Prime examples are Bunny’s Workshop SuperPI ranking, the Futuremark ORB, Ripping.org and of course the website you are reading this article on. From that point forward, our evolution becomes much more HWBOT focused. In 2006 HWBOT released the concept of Overclocking Leagues in which we rank overclockers by merit across various benchmark applications by the sum of obtained HWBoints, a point algorithm concept conceptualized by Mtzki. The League is a concept that links benchmark leaderboards together. In the next step, we see the rise of the time-constraint overclocking competitions. The competitions are a form of the League concept, only limited in time and with a smaller selection of benchmarks and hardware.

The next step is as evident as it is simple: as competitions offer an exciting style of overclocking where your overclocking abilities are not only measured by the benchmark result, but also by the time you are able to achieve it in, it makes sense to build a structure for it. We call this structure the OC Esports.

Before we continue, let me emphasize that nothing will change on the HWBOT.org website. The only change you will notice is that, from January 1 2015, all competitions will link to the OC-ESPORTS.io platform. Both sites run on the same database using the same back-end, which means that submitting a result on the OC-Esports site will also appear in the HWBOT benchmark rankings.

In essence you can look at it this way: we separate the competitive from the statistical overclocking. Everything related to the pure overclocking will continue to be hosted on the HWBOT.org platform. This includes benchmark rankings, the leagues and so on. Everything related to competitive overclocking moves to the new OC-ESPORTS.io platform. This includes mainly the content you can find under the Competitions section.

The platform launches today in beta form and will officially start its first overclocking season on January 1st, 2015. During the beta phase you can enjoy a test round of the Road To Pro Challenger Divisions and let us know all the bugs and issues we can fix before the start in January!

Beta: Road To Pro Challenger Divisions

It’s been about a year since we first openly talked about the Revision6 plans. End of September 2013, Pieter attended an ASRock overclocking event in China and disclosed the basics of our new plan for competitive overclocking and later posted in our forums. Over the course of the year we published documents detailing the plans and based on the feedback and questions from the community, adopted new ideas and made changes to the plan.

To explain the concept of the Road To Pro Challenger Divisions, refer to the three images below.

The Road To Pro features eight divisions if you included the top category of Pro OC. In the Challenger Division structure you can find seven different divisions. Each of the Divisions has three rounds of two months, each round consisting of five stages. By accumulating points in the five stages and three rounds, you can win the title of Division Champion of the season. The Divisions are defined by the hardware limitations as each division only allows for specific CPU and GPU components. For example, Division I is restricted to only mainstream Core i7 and a high-end single GPU graphics card. Division III is then again limited to the Pentium and a low-end graphics card. You can check out the Division Round pages at OC-ESPORTS.io to find out the exact hardware limitations.

Important Note! Even though you will be able to participate in all of the divisions during the beta phase, you will have to pick your Division next season. It will not be allowed to participate in two Divisions at the same time.

The rest of the story is the same: submit your best benchmark scores before the end of the competition and gather as much points as possible. In the image below we explained to submission process in detail.

But There’s More! Schedule, Competition Levels and Series

As we mentioned in the opening paragraph, OC-ESPORTS.io is the new platform for everything competitive overclocking related. That includes our own Road To Pro as well as the sponsored competitions. To accommodate the sponsored overclocking competitions we have three features ready: the Schedule, the competition levels and competition Series. In future articles we will explain the features in detail as especially the competition level feature requires a bit of background information. To make a long story short (and give you something to look forward to), partners will be able to set up their own overclocking competition series by linking their individual overclocking events and competitions together. Together with the Schedule, this will allow partners to plan ahead when it comes to overclocking activities. It is an opportunity to tell us an even more compelling story and take us on an overclocking adventure during the year.

We have been discussing the opportunities with several key partners and, honestly, we look forward to seeing the plans and ideas become reality in 2015. There’s some amazing stuff coming!

The Global Leaderboard – Season 2015

One last item we want to share with you today is the Global Leaderboard. This is the all-encompassing ranking which connects the Road To Pro and all the other competitions and series. On the beta version of the site you will find a Leaderboard for 2014, but note that this is still a work-in-progress as we have to implement the competition levels and restructure the competitions of 2014 to fit the OC-ESPORTS.io platform. To understand how the Global Leaderboard works, refer to the four images below.

It is actually quite simple. Each competition that we host on the OC-ESPORTS.io platform which meets the pre-defined specification will carry a certain weight in the Global Leaderboard. For winning a live grand final you will earn more points than winning a standalone online competition event. In the slides above you can find the different levels (Level 1 to Level 3) and their specifications. Note that we go quite far in defining the competitions, including the minimum prizes for example, as it is important that this system is fair to all partners.

Points can be earned across all competitions in five different categories: overall ranking, stage ranking, participation, Early Bird and Mini-contest. The first three concepts are something you are already familiar with, so let’s focus on the latter two.

The Early Bird bonus is given to overclockers who submit a result within the first week of a competition. It is designed to motivate people to jump on the competition early and get a nice start of the competition.

The Mini-contest is a small competition within each competition for the Enthusiast, Novice and Rookie overclockers. Until the mid of any competition, they can compete in a mini-ranking limited to only their category type. Being the best Rookie mid-contest will yield you extra points

It is important to understand that only the best point category will contribute to your Global Leaderboard total. You can find an example in the images above. It comes down to this: for a standalone online competition you can maximum earn 50 points (by winning it). Even if you win all three stages, you only gain the points for winning the competition since 50 points for the overall win is more than the 25 points for the stage win.

We wish you a lot of overclocking pleasure and joy on the new platform and hope you will like it! If you have any questions, feedback, ideas or comments, feel free to drop us a message below or suggest it in the Revision6 sub-forum!

2 year and 2 months ago –
I think this was a huge amount of work but it's gonna take a while for people to understand the rules for each division and get used to this format. By the way... why the need for a new site?

Massman said: To clarify the Division restrictions for the test season,

About Division II & III (stage1).

The (text) description of the overview ... doesnt match the (text) description of the limitation paragraph , regarding the GPU section.

Division II

Overview

In Challenger Division II round the hardware is limited to mainstream Core i5 processors and mainstream single GPU graphics cards. The processor choice is limited to the Core i5 4690K, 4670K, 3570K, 2550K or 2500K. The graphics card choice is limited to the GeForce GTX 760, Radeon R9 270 or 270X. You can find more information about restrictions on the competition stage pages.

Monstru said: I think this was a huge amount of work but it's gonna take a while for people to understand the rules for each division and get used to this format. By the way ... why the need for a new site?

We wanted to make something that is easily accessible to people who are not completely in to overclocking. HWBOT is very much scoped to "everything overclocking", with rankings about pretty much everything.

We also don't want to confuse with two different ranking systems: Overclocker Leagues and Global Leaderboard for competitions.

Lastly, the new platform will give us some freedom to see what is possible with a more commercial direction while keeping HWBOT free for everyone. It's no secret that we want to make the new platform financially independent from advertising dollars or euros.

Could you clarify this before I purchase a different gpu. The competition stages say, "a Nvidia GeForce 7 series videocard" but in the overview tab it says, "The graphics card choice is limited to GeForce 7800 GTX, GeForce 7800 GTX 512 and Quadro 4500"

Thanks!

Also, is there going to be threads in the competition sub forum to discuss this, or continue to discuss here, in the announcement thread?

2 year and 2 months ago –
Shouldn't this page: http://oc-esports.io/#/road-to-pro be links so that you can get to the particular contest/division that you are interested in? Right now, the only way to get to the stages is follow the links posted in this announcement or through the hwbot competition page.

When you click each stage in a certain division, the closing date looks wrong, shows oct 1 instead of nov1